The Secret Lives of the Nazis

How Hitler's evil henchmen plundered Europe

Paul Roland

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781788284158
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

While demanding that the German people made sacrifices for a war which few in Hitler's inner circle believed they could win, Nazi leaders were leading lives of incredible debauchery, privilege, and power. It was theft and murder on the grandest scale.Ex-poultry farmer Heinrich Himmler used his influence as head of the SS and Gestapo to strip the assets of millions of victims. Joseph Goebbels, the 'poison dwarf' and Hitler's cynical spin doctor, exploited his position as Propaganda Minister to bed a succession of movie starlets. Meanwhile, on Goering's orders, thousands of trains packed with looted treasure were transported back to Germany from France alone.Had the German people known the truth about the men they entrusted with their future, history might have taken a very different turn. The Secret Lives of the Nazis reveals the terrible truth behind the pernicious propaganda peddled by the Nazis and the murderous private feuds that went on behind closed doors as members of the Nazi leadership schemed and plotted to eliminate their political rivals, while accumulating incredible personal wealth and priceless possessions.

Chapter One

SEX, DRUGS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS

‘What luck for the rulers that men do not think.’

–Adolf Hitler

Only in Nazi Germany could a government official excite himself over the discovery that his Führer’s cook was one thirty-second Jewish and consider the matter sufficiently significant to mark it ‘Top Secret’, as Himmler’s lieutenant Adolf Eichmann did.

Only in Nazi Germany could two functionaries become bitter enemies because one favoured a specific method of execution over another, as did Rudolf Hoess and Christian Wirth, rival death camp commandants whose quarrel had nothing to do with which lethal gas (carbon monoxide or Zyklon B) was the more humane, but which was the more efficient method of murder.

Only in Hitler’s nightmare state could such amoral nonentities acquire the power of life and death over their fellow human beings, whom their psychotic leader had classified as Untermenschen (subhumans) and had deemed ‘unworthy of life’.

Nazi Germany was Hitler’s psychosis made manifest, a Kafkaesque world of oppressive surveillance and suspicion, of amoral laws enforced by terror, torture and intimidation: one in which children were encouraged to inform on their parents, where the law was used to prosecute the innocent and where no dissenter dared express their thoughts for fear of being dragged off to a concentration camp in the middle of the night without trial, under the criminal decree known as ‘Night and Fog’. But then Nazi Germany was a gangster state run by criminals, psychopaths, sadists and self-serving petty bureaucrats.

It was the age of gangsterism, with criminals profiting from an unpopular law (Prohibition) in America and fascist governments exploiting political instability and financial insecurity in Europe, while Stalin presided over a reign of terror in the name of communism in Soviet Russia.

Night of the Long Knives

It was not mere competition for the Führer’s favours that fuelled the Nazi leaders’ enmity, but a vicious personal rivalry, one that would mean death for one or more members of Hitler’s inner circle if the opportunity presented itself. For that reason, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had rushed to Bad Wiessee in Upper Bavaria to be with Hitler on the Night of the Long Knives (the Röhm putsch) on 30 June 1934, rather than remain in Berlin where he feared he might be added to the list of victims being drawn up by Goering and Himmler.

It was only after he had satisfied himself that he could still count on Hitler’s protection that Goebbels returned to the capital to coordinate the propaganda campaign that attempted to justify the murder of the SA leadership and dozens of political rivals as a necessary act of ‘self-defence’ by the state.

For some months Röhm had been demanding that his Brownshirts should be officially recognized as an autonomous militia and incorporated into the regular army. This was something Hitler could not permit for it would antagonize the army High Command who would then have a legitimate reason to stage their own coup. And so the SA was falsely accused of plotting to overthrow the National Socialist government barely a year after it had seized power. Hitler had prevaricated for some time, reluctant as ever to make a decision when one was needed, and only gave the order when presented with fake documents purportedly written by Röhm, ordering the assassination of his Führer as the first act in the coup.

In his broadcast and subsequent press conference Goebbels added that many of those involved in the alleged coup were ‘asocial’ or ‘diseased elements’, by which he meant homo­sexuals, for whom the serial seducer had a particular aversion. By alluding to this ‘cancerous element’ within the Party, Goebbels gave the impression that the regime would act as defender of the moral health of the nation, an assurance which he and the other Nazi leaders were ill-qualified to give.

The Hitler Enigma

‘Does it not constitute a danger to the Nazi movement if it can be said that Nazi leaders are chosen for sexual reasons?’

–Heinrich Himmler

Conflicted Personality

Hitler and his acolytes promoted National Socialism as a radical and popular political movement, but it differed in one very significant aspect from the totalitarian regimes that took root in Italy under Mussolini and in Spain under Franco. Nazi Germany was – in essence – the manifestation of a personality cult whose most ardent followers were in thrall to a malignant narcissist who demanded devotion or death. He in turn served their need for a redeemer after the humiliating defeat of the 1914–18 war and the abdication of the Kaiser.

They revered him as the saviour of Germany and spoke of him in quasi-religious terms.

‘I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine,’ recalled an anonymous admirer, ‘and I was left with only one wish – to be at home and alone with the great overwhelming experience.’

Hitler used the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) as a platform for his own ends, to enable him to seize power and exercise control over every aspect of his subjects’ lives, from the ideological indoctrination of children to the extermination of the mentally and physically disabled who were deemed ‘unworthy of life’. Like all tyrants and dictators, Hitler was a paranoiac who having taken power by subterfuge and secured it by force, imposed his will by terror and intimidation.

The Party slogan ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ (‘One people, one nation, one leader’) was intended to convey a unity of purpose under one benevolent father figure, but it more accurately expressed Hitler’s abnormal identification with a nation that he would ultimately abandon to its fate after it had failed him and whose destruction he would demand in order to punish it for having betrayed him.

Hitler was a violently conflicted personality who believed that he was always right, that no opinion other than his own was worth hearing, and who demanded absolute, unquestioning obedience. This psychosis and volatility was rooted in his early life and may have derived partly from his aberrant sexuality.

Early Life

Fascism has long been suspected of having a particularly strong appeal for the disaffected and discontented, who harbour a burning desire to be recognized and have their extremist opinions and distorted values validated by like-minded individuals.

The abuse Hitler suffered at the hands of his violent, domineering father and his over-identification with his indulgent and doting mother may have contributed to his conflicted personality, but whether it was nature or nurture that formed his character, Hitler grew up hating the world.

He had a particular loathing for his teachers, who described him as ‘argumentative, autocratic, self-opinionated’, lacking in self-control and bad-tempered. And he, in turn, dismissed them as ‘erudite apes’, ‘effete’ and ‘mentally deranged’, which says more about his need to justify his lack of academic qualifications and eventual expulsion than it does about those he disparaged. During his five years at Realschule (secondary or high school), he was prohibited from progressing to the next class on two occasions and had to repeat the entire year.

The hateful child grew into a belligerent young man who despised those who were cleverer and more accomplished than he – he discarded his one and only friend, August Kubizek, when the young pianist was accepted into a conservatoire shortly after Hitler had been rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Unable to accept the possibility that he did not possess sufficient talent, he blamed the admissions committee which, he subsequently discovered, included four Jews. He later claimed to have written to the Director of the Academy, threatening that ‘the Jews will pay!’

As he prowled the streets of the Austrian capital, bemoaning his fate and looking for someone to blame for it, he claimed to have been transfixed by the appearance of an Orthodox Jew in a long black coat and wearing the traditional sidelocks. His self-loathing was turned on a convenient scapegoat and in that moment Hitler realized that he had found an outlet for his bitterness and innate hostility.

‘Wherever I went,’ he later wrote, ‘I began to see Jews and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity . . . I began to hate them . . . I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti-Semite.’

Hitler began reading the anti-Semitic literature that was on sale openly in Vienna at the time; pamphlets and periodicals such as Ostara, which mixed pseudo-völkisch ‘mysticism’ with extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. These hysterical texts with their crude pornographic cartoons reinforced his prejudices and gratified his sadistic sexual fantasies.

He would later romanticize his lonely years as an itinerant artist in Vienna because it served the myth that he had risen from obscurity to greatness by the blessing of Providence, the same invisible hand of fate that enabled him to survive several assassination attempts and which instilled in him a sense of destiny. But the years in Vienna may not have been as hard as Hitler later claimed. His total income inherited from his late parents, an aunt’s bequest and an orphan’s pension that he obtained by falsely claiming to be an art student amounted to 100 kronen a month (roughly the equivalent of £650/$830 in 2016), which he supplemented by begging.

The tramps with whom he lived for a time in a charity ward at Meidling resented the fact that he wouldn’t take the labouring jobs that they were prepared to accept, although he later falsely claimed to have worked on a building site. His claim to have become an anti-Semite on seeing an Orthodox Jew is also suspect as he was known to have befriended a Hungarian Jew named Neuman in the Meidling hostel and to have accepted a gift of a frock coat from him.

Here among the flea-ridden dosshouses and charity hostels of Vienna, Hitler festered in envy and resentment at the world that had rejected him and fermented his nihilist philosophy, which held that life was a ‘brutal struggle’ (Mein Kampf), a creed engendered by what Joachim Fest called ‘the hate and impotence of the outcast’. In projecting his own compulsion for revenge on to a convenient scapegoat and attributing his paranoia to an imaginary cabal of conspirators, Hitler attempted to assuage the turmoil within his own troubled psyche.

His only friend Kubizek observed: ‘He saw everywher...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Picture section 1
• Chapter Two
• Picture section 2
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Resources
• Bibliography
• Image credits